Knights Landing CPU Speculation

Knights Landing is Intel’s first clean sheet redesign of the Larrabee family, targeted at throughput computing and manufactured on a 14nm process with products expected in late 2014 or early 2015. The adoption of AVX3, on-package embedded DRAM, and bootable products have been disclosed, but most details are unknown. This article analyzes the options available for the Knights Landing CPU core and explains why Intel’s existing cores are a poor fit for the target workloads, concluding that the most likely outcome is a new custom core for Knights Landing.